The site has been taken over by a new group who will revive thee site and get it a bit of of update and will start updating the site again.
PMBD isnt down. Just the former staff doesn't publish updates of new content in their archives. We don't know the exactly reason, people around said many of the staff members unfortunatelly died due to Covid - terrible losses. The ones left doesn't know how to operate that kind of coding. The possibility of PMBD Forum be down is near to 0, only if the owner did that... but we already announced we will have discord server - the public one won't allow any mention to paid stuff to avoid be taking down, but its a way to track everyone as you mentioned.
From their last statement, doesnt sound like the new group had taken over the site and they too aint certain what was going on.